It isn’t really about Freddie Gray. And it isn’t really about race, either.

It’s about federal power over policing in America.

That agenda, which SHTF reported on back in December, is made plain by the latest from the Rev. Al Sharpton.

His march on Washington isn’t just an attempt to stir up sympathy points in a divided political landscape. By his own words, Sharpton is trying to use the issue to fight states’ rights and have the Justice Department intervene at the federal level with local police affairs:

“We need the Justice Department to step in and take over policing in this country. In the 20th Century, we had to fight states’ rights to get the right to vote, and we got to fight states’ rights in terms of closing down police cases. Police must be held accountable. I don’t think all police are bad; I don’t even think most are bad; but those that are need to be held accountable.”

In his cynical, opportunistic way, Sharpton is a attempting to recreate the civil rights movement of the 60s, with all the trappings a politically corrected generation that swarms on Twitter before it gathers on the streets.

How far will things go? Many believe the ultimate goal is to use the strings of federal funding and the threat of civil rights lawsuits to essentially create a national police unit that would trump local and state powers. Does justice spring from that process? The question may be too late.

As the Baltimore Sun reported, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who controversially called for “space” for those who wished to destroy, is in lock-step with Sharpton’s federal agenda:

The mayor promised that “we will get justice for Freddie Gray” and defended the steps she has taken to reform Baltimore’s policing practices. Rawlings-Blake noted that even before Gray’s arrest April 12 she had asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Baltimore Police Department, saying that was the strongest action she could take short of entering into a consent decree.

“Nobody wants the Department of Justice to come in and take over our city,” she said.

Nobody, that is, but those involved in President Obama’s racially-themed fourth quarter politics.

From Michael Brown in Ferguson, to Trayvon Martin in Florida, Eric Garner in New York and now Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the usual suspects have been working hard not only to link police abuse with race, but to patch it into a larger civil rights case spanning nationwide that requires federal action over local police matters.

Via Twitter, the ACLU declared that the ‘Black Spring has begun’ and urged cooperation with the Justice Department in efforts to collect data on deaths and abuse in police hands.

It references the Arab Spring, in which grassroots uprising ultimately gave way to military dictatorship, at least in Egypt.

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